


A cheesy high-school drama

by Species8472



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2020-12-28 15:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21138929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Species8472/pseuds/Species8472
Summary: Lauren is a lifer and her local high school and is beginning her junior year when she meets a new girl who shows her to look at her town in a different light. (I think it'll be a lot better than it sounds.)





	1. First Day

My stomach drops as my alarm goes off. 6:15. The first day of school. I force myself to a sitting position and untangle the covers from around my feet. I rub my eyes, forcing them to increase their resolution. As I make my way to the bathroom I think back to where I left that dreaded place where I was obligated to return. If I remember correctly, I ended the year with almost no friends and average grades. I didn’t really have a distinguished place in my class. I wasn’t overly smart, I wasn’t overly dumb, I certainly wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t in any clubs. I did play basketball, but that was nothing to brag about. I shower and dress quickly. I run my hands through my damp hair, its length still surprises me. I had cut it off at the beginning of summer, but three months of short hair doesn’t compare to a lifetime of long. I smooth it out into the only way I can wear it now, kind of a cross between Emma Watson, when she had short hair, and I hate to say it, but Justin Bieber.  
“Lauren, come down and eat breakfast! You’re going to be late!” my mom shouts from downstairs.  
“Coming!” I grab my sweatshirt and run downstairs, jumping over the last few steps.  
“Careful, it would be bad luck for you to get a sprained ankle on the first day of junior year.” I grab a plate from its cabinet just in time to steal a hot waffle from the iron. I sit down at the table and begin to generously spread peanut butter on it. I then fold it in half and proceed to eat it like a sandwich.  
“If you’re going to do that, at least use a napkin,” says my mom. She rips off a paper towel from the roll and hands it to me.  
“Thanks.” I finish my waffle and go to brush my teeth. As I glance in the mirror, a familiar feeling returns. Kind of like stage fright, but about a million times worse. Unlike a stage, where mistakes and awkwardness could be passed off as nerves, and forgotten shortly after, school was relentless. If I somehow screwed up, I wouldn’t see the end of it unless I did something even worse. Maybe that’s my place at the school, the person everyone talks about for some comic relief.  
The ride to school was relatively silent. I had made sure to turn the radio on the second the engine was on so that my mom wouldn’t try to talk to me. As the car pulls up to the school, I see so many familiar faces that I don’t even want to get out of the car. I hadn’t seen any of these people since June, the reunion would definitely be an awkward one. I grab my backpack from the back seat and open the car door.  
“Good luck!” my mom says right before I close the door. I look back at her and give her the kind of smile that says ‘thanks, I’ll need it.’  
As I walk towards the front doors, I notice a new face sitting on one of the metal benches that line the entrance walkway. This is rather unusual because where I live, people are pretty much expected to find a school and stick with it for as long as possible. I had been at this school for 11 years, and throughout all that time maybe only 40 new people joined. And nobody left.  
This new face belongs to the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She isn’t magazine pretty, with perfectly shaped eyebrows and huge eyes, but there is just something about her that makes me forget everything I was worried about. She has dark brown hair, cut into a perfectly shaped bob. One side is tucked behind her ear and the other is covering part of one of her eyes. She has some sort of a paper in her hand and is studying it intensely. I take just a moment longer to notice what she is looking at. It’s a map of our campus, I can tell by the pattern of squares that have been in my life for so long. I check my watch; I have about 8 minutes until class starts. I attempt to discretely wander in her direction, in order to disguise the fact that I was absolutely dying to talk to her.  
“Do you need some help finding your classes?” I ask. She looks up at me with her dark brown eyes wide in surprise.  
“Uh, sure. I’m trying to find room 1437, for Biology.”  
“Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. So, we’re right here,” I point at the corresponding location on the map, “and the Biolab is right here,” I move my finger to the upper right corner of the second largest box on the paper, “so you’ll need to go in through these doors and then left down this hallway to the north wing. From there it’ll be obvious which room is for bio. It’s got plants everywhere and huge windows.”  
“Thanks! But…” she hesitates.  
“Do you want me to go with you? I’ve got math, which is just across the hall from Bio.”  
“That would be great, thanks” she blushes slightly, “I’m always so bad with directions.”  
She stands up and swings her backpack over her shoulders. As we walk towards the doors, she starts up a conversation.  
“How long have you been going here?”  
“Too long, almost my entire life. How about you? Where are you from?”  
“Kind of all over, I was born in Chicago, but my dad is in the military, so we have to move every few years.”  
“That sounds like it could be fun, always seeing new things, meeting new people,” I say, secretly thinking how great it would be to be able to start over so many times, and then not giving people enough time to form their opinions about me.  
“It was fun at first, but now it’s just a part of me. When I was pretty young, I got used to not having many friends, and least not any I could keep for very long.”  
“I could see how that would get lonely after a while, I guess I’m just used to wanting to run away from all this,” I gestured to the classrooms and people around me, “and not being able to.”  
When we finally reached the north wing, I pointed to the Biolab, “That’s bio. I’ll be in math, right there,” I shifted my hand to the direction of the math classroom. “Classes are about 45 minutes long; do you want to meet here and I can walk with you to your next class?” Did I really just say that? What was I thinking! I don’t want her to think I’m too forward, I was really hoping to make a new friend, not scare someone into avoiding me for the rest of the year.  
“That would be awesome, thank you so much.” She starts to walk towards her classroom, but then turning around, says, “I’m Edie, by the way.”  
“Lauren, at your service,” I say, bowing dramatically. She bursts into laughter, waves goodbye, and then enters the Biolab.


	2. Seasonal Changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Lauren and Edie become closer, some new (and very interesting) developments take place.

Over the next couple of months Edie and I became very close. We would always eat lunch together in some deserted corner of the cafeteria, always walk to our classes together, study together and wait for our parents to come pick us up after school together. We even joined yearbook club! As it turns out, we have so much more in common than I ever thought possible. We both have two dogs, love being outside and photography. The only major difference is that she has a younger brother, whereas I’m an only child. We would have sleepovers almost every weekend, usually at my house because her brother has soccer practice in the afternoons. We would watch classic Disney movies, make tons of popcorn and stay up until 2 in the morning, to the great annoyance of my parents, who couldn’t learn to accept our inability to stay quiet. It was like this for some time, I didn’t want to mess anything up.   
I guess everything changed for me one day in December. We were on Christmas break and it was a few days after Christmas when Edie texted me to ask if I wanted to get together. It had snowed all last night and was still snowing, and she wanted to know if we could do a fun, winter-themed photoshoot of each other. Normally I would despise anyone who suggested such an activity, but, knowing Edie, she would find a way to make it interesting and fun.   
We met up at the park near my house, the snow was so perfectly laid it looked like someone had just thrown a fuzzy white blanket over the entirety of the park. She had brought her polaroid camera for pictures, which certainly beat my idea of just using our phones.  
“Where do you think we should start?” she asked me.  
“I don’t know, you know I’m no good at this kind of stuff,” I said, while brushing the snow out of my hair.  
“No, wait… I have an idea,” she says, walking off.   
“What? I hope it doesn’t involve throwing snow at me,” I say as a joke while running after her.  
“Actually, it does.” She turns around and lightly sprinkles a handful of snowflakes over my head, grinning like the Cheshire cat throughout the entire process.   
“What are you doing?” I ask through fits of laughter.   
“You’ll see. Ok, I’m done, now follow me.” She starts toward a pine tree on the edge of the field. “Stand right here,” she gestures to the base of the tree. I comply and stand amidst the snowy branches. My movement causes even more snow to fall in my hair, once again resulting in my laughter. As I’m trying to shake some of the excess snow from my hair, I hear her camera click. I look at her, still smiling.   
“What? No, I wasn’t ready,” I protest.   
“Well, let’s just wait and see,” she says, pulling the paper from her camera and fanning it in the air. I eagerly look over her shoulder and watch as the colors develop. What began to appear before my eyes was a picture of someone I hardly recognized. My nose was all scrunched up from laughter, my eyes were squinted closed and I sported a toothy grin from ear to ear.   
“Wow, that’s horrible. Ok, your turn.” I try to grab the picture from her hand.  
“No, not so fast. If you really don’t like it, we can try again, but I think its super cute,” she says, smiling at me. I can feel my face turning bright red. I try to cover it up my cupping my hands around my face and exhaling into them.   
“I guess it’s not that bad, just don’t make me do that again,” I say.   
“Fine, then it’s my turn.” Edie is naturally photogenic; she looks great in everything. After taking about 15 pictures of her, her camera ran out of film, so we had to call it a day.   
“Do you want to get something warm to drink before we go our separate ways?” Asks Edie.  
“Sure, that sounds good. How about that coffee shop just down the road?”  
“Perfect! Let’s go!” As we are walking down the sidewalk, snow begins falling more rapidly. We break into a run about 2 blocks from the café. By the time we reach the door, we are covered in snow and completely out of breath. Just looking at Edie, hair covered in snow, trying to catch her breath while fighting fits of laughter, I feel something more than friendship for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer than I thought it would. Some complications came up.


	3. A Shakespeare Conclusion

It was horrible, having to pretend like nothing had changed between us. Even though, to her knowledge, nothing had. I always felt awkward now, I would be so scared to say something wrong that I would avoid her for days at a time. We still hung out, I couldn’t just shun her completely, and I still liked spending time together, if not now more than ever. I would begin to think about how I could emerge from her friendzone by, for example, leaving a letter in her locker, with a meeting time and place and then confessing my feelings to her. Of course, in my head, all these situations ended well, but how could I be expected to predict reality.  
One day, Wednesday, as I was walking to my last class of the day, Edie ran up to me.  
“Hey, I need to talk to you, meet me in the bleachers by the track after class,” she says hurriedly.  
“Wait, why? What’d going on?” I say, shocked by her tone.  
“I have to go; I’ll tell you then.” She quickly walks off.  
The next class seemed to last for an eternity, I couldn’t stop thinking about what she had to tell me. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. The second the bell rang I headed straight for the track. Edie was already there and waiting for me. As I got closer, I could see she had been crying. Her eyes were red and the skin around them was swollen.  
“What’s going on? Are you ok?” I say in a very concerned tone as I climb over the bleachers to get to her.  
“My parents are making me leave school, my dad is being moved to another base, in Nebraska.” She says, with tears still streaming from the corners of her eyes.  
“What! When?” I demand, probably loud enough for someone on the opposite side of the field to hear.  
“He needs to be there and ready to work in two weeks, we’re leaving this weekend.” She hugs her knees to her chest and tucks her head down. “I’m not sure I can go through this again, I don’t want to leave, not now. This school was finally starting to feel like a place where I could be myself,” she says through ragged breaths.  
“Is there any way you could stay behind? You know, your parents move, and you could live with someone here?”  
“My dad would never let me. He is very intent on ‘keeping the family together,’” she gestures quotation marks in the air to show her dad’s exact words.  
“And what would I say any way? I should just go knock on some stranger’s door and say, ‘Hi, I don’t want to move so can I live with you?’” she says, this time with anger in her voice.  
“Hey, it’s ok, I get it. Moving to a new place is a very hard and scary thing to do.”  
I put my hand on her back and apply slight pressure in hopes of steadying her breathing. She twists her shoulder away and shouts,  
“No! You don’t get it! It’s not just hard or scary, it’s actually painful! It’s like every time I am forced to leave a place, a piece of me is ripped out and left behind. You don’t understand because you’ve lived in the same place for your whole life! You’ve never had to move, change schools, make new friends.”  
“Ok, fine. I’ve never gone through this, but at least let me help you.” I say, trying not to get upset.  
“How can you possibly help me. What can you possibly say to me that I haven’t heard a thousand times already?”  
“I don’t know, but I’ll figure something out.”  
“That’s a nice lie,” she says.  
“Hey, listen to me, you know me better than anyone, even my parents, and I’m pretty sure I know just as much about you. So, we’ll figure this out together.”  
“Just stop, I asked you to come out here so that I could tell you that I had to leave, not so that you could make me feel even worse about leaving than I already do.” She grabs her backpack from beside her and, swinging it over her shoulder, stands up and begins to descend to the field.  
“Wait!” I say, running after her.  
“I have to go.”  
She’s the best friend I’ve ever had. I decide right then and there that I need to tell her how I feel. I know it probably won’t increase the chance of her staying, but if I don’t tell her, I know I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.  
That night, after dinner I sat in my room, plotting the perfect reveal. Nothing too public, I do have one more year in this retched town, but nothing too subtle either. Finally, I thought of the perfect way to tell her. I’ll leave a note in her locker in the morning, before everyone gets there, with a cute poem that goes like this:  
Roses are red,  
Violets are blue  
If I asked you out,  
What would you do?  
Hopefully she’d know who it was from and would come find me to tell me that she felt the exact same way! Hopefully.  
There was nothing I could do to make myself sleep that night. I tried turning over, curling up, holding a pillow over my head, I even tried all those mind games scientists recommend to calm your brain down. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways it could go wrong, she might not know who is was, she might just think its some stupid prank, and, worst of all, she might not like me as much as I like her. I finally got to sleep around 1 in the morning.  
The next morning, I dressed in one of my cutest outfits, light blue jeans with a pink and yellow striped sweater that was rather low-cut for my taste, but still school appropriate. I took a second to run my hands through my hair, untangling any knots and sweeping the front part to the side.  
“You look cute, any occasion?” My mom says as I run downstairs.  
“No, just felt like it,” I said, even though I knew I was sporting a suspiciously large grin. “Can we go to school early today? Edie and I have a project to finish before class.”  
“Sure, do you want a piece of fruit or something before we leave?”  
“Yeah, I’ll grab an apple.” I say, taking an apple from the basket of fruit on the counter and heading for the door.  
“Wow, you’re in a hurry, what’s so important?”  
“Nothing, I just don’t want to make Edie wait for me to work on our project.”  
“Alright, let me just grab the keys and put on some shoes.”  
As we make our way to the school, I keep thinking about her. There were so many ways this could go wrong, but even the remote possibility of her liking me was worth taking the chance.  
We pull up to the school, I grab my backpack and open the door.  
“Good luck, have fun!” says my mom before the door closes.  
“Thanks, I will,” I say through the window glass. I walk through the front doors; it was about 20 minutes before people would start arriving. I fetch the note that I had written the night before from my pocket. I walk down the hallway lined with lockers, 126, 127, 128, 129… Edie’s. I unlock her locker, (we knew each other’s combinations so that we could borrow books from each other) and carefully place the note on the shelf in her locker. As I close the door, I think, ‘Ok, now I just have to wait.’ I sit down on one of the wooden benches in the hallway and check my phone. No notifications from Edie, but I guess that’s to be expected, she was so upset yesterday. My phone chimes with an email from the head of school, asking all students to go to the common area, a large cement patio, lined on three sides with school buildings, before class starts, and that is was just a quick announcement regarding student’s mental health. ‘Oh, great. Probably another old white guy who says they understand what kids today are going through. At least Edie and I will have something to joke about for the rest of the week.’ I think. As students begin to arrive, I get up and begin to slowly walk towards the commons. Today was rather sunny, but still very cold. I sit down in a corner of the commons, at least that way the speaker has very little chance of standing right next to me. Students soon flood into the area from all directions. I scan the crowd for Edie, but she’s not here yet. Then, teachers start joining the student and standing around the sides of what was beginning to look like more of an arena. This was odd, teachers usually weren’t invited to announcements made to the student body.  
The principle soon arrives, followed by the head of schools, a middle-aged man who had balding black hair, slicked back. I watched for the assumed speaker, but none appeared. The principle stood near the door he had just come through and cleared his throat.  
“Ahem, may I have your attention please,” he says, in a deep voice. This had little to no effect on students, who kept talking loudly.  
“May I have your attention please,” he bellowed. This was more effective; at least half the students turned to listen.  
“I have some very tragic news to report.” This got my full attention, what could he mean? It also worked on the rest of the students; it was now dead silent.  
“The school board received a call this morning with information that I feel is my duty to tell you. Edie Brooks has committed suicide.”  
Everything he said and did after that was a blur. Suicide? No, he has to be lying, I know Edie, she would never even think of doing something like this. Maybe he meant attempted, no, even that’s too awful.  
I get disrupted from my trance by the bustle of student around me. The principle had finished speaking and had excused us to classes. I try to stand up, but I can’t feel my legs, it’s like I’ve been paralyzed. I can’t move my arms. I just sit there with hazy eyes until all the students are gone. I sense someone coming up to me, a hand rests on my arm.  
“Hey, are you ok? How about you come to my office at lunch so we can talk.” Now I recognized the voice, it was Mrs. Embers, the notorious school counselor.  
I see my vision shift up and down, I must be nodding my head. Now my legs move as if I have no control over them, like some sort of android or mechanized being. I see the scene shift around me, as if the world was moving around me and not the other way around. My locker approaches and I watch as my hand turns the dial to unlock it. The knob clicks and I lift the handle. There is something unusual on top of my books, a piece of paper. I pick it up and turn it over, letters are written neatly in lines in black pen. As I scan the symbols, they begin to form words. 

Dear Lauren,  
I’m so sorry. You really are the best friend I’ve ever had. I don’t want to leave, but one way or another I have to. I hope you can forgive me.  
Love, Edie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took me so long to finish this, it was a rather difficult chapter to write.


End file.
